Henry Gray   View a U.S.A. Hosp. Dept. marked copy of Gray's second edition in this collection   Henry Gray (1827–1861) was an English  anatomist and surgeon.  On May 6, 1845, he entered as a student at St. George’s Hospital.  While still a student, he secured in 1848, the triennial prize of Royal College of Surgeons for an essay entitled “The Origin, Connexions and Distribution of nerves to the human eye and its appendages, illustrated by comparative dissections of the eye in other vertebrate In 1852, at the early age of twenty five, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for a dissertation ”On the structure and Use of Spleen ”. In 1858 Gray published the first edition of his Anatomy.  Henry Gray's Anatomy of the Human Body, commonly shortened to Gray's Anatomy, is an English language human anatomy textbook widely regarded as a classic work on the subject, which covered 750 pages and contained 363 figures. He had the good fortune of securing the help of his friend Dr. H V Vandyke Carter, a skilled draughtsman and formerly a demonstrator of anatomy at St. George’s Hospital. Carter made the drawings from which the engravings were executed, and the success of the book was, in the first instance, undoubtedly due in no small measure to the excellence of its illustrations.  A second edition was prepared by Gray and published in 1860. He held successively the posts of demonstrator of Anatomy, curator of the museum, and Lecturer of Anatomy at St. George’s Hospital, and was in 1861 a candidate for the post of assistant surgeon. Unfortunately, he was struck down by an attack of confluent smallpox., which he contracted while looking after a nephew who was suffering from that disease and died at the early age of thirty-four.   The Gray's Anatomy was one of the Civil War medical books issued to the Union Army during the war by the Surgeon General of the United States Army:  Gray's Anatomy. Gray, Anatomy Descriptive and Surgical.